Rasheed redo not smart even in hindsight

Published 12:00 am, Thursday, May 20, 2010

They dropped to 50 wins in the regular season, and Michael Finley was there for about half of them.

Their Hall of Fame forward had a knee issue, and he was part of a Big Three not thought to be the same anymore. Their short but wider-than-a-parking-space rebounder was inconsistent, and their young, athletic point guard still had a few flaws.

All they had to believe in, it seemed, was a core of veterans who had won a title together.

So the Spurs were the Celtics for a while, and now they aren't. Boston is two wins from the Finals with qualities the Spurs would like to have.

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But there's one quality the Spurs aren't sure they could have ever had, and this goes back to another parallel between these franchises.

Then, last summer, both went after tall, experienced free agents from Detroit.

There are a lot of reasons the Celtics have won five straight against two franchises that combined to win 120 regular-season games. For one, they are playing defense as the Spurs like to play.

They are also winning as a team without the playful/silly antics sometimes found in Cleveland or Orlando. This is another similarity between the Celtics and Spurs.

The Celtics do theirs with more anger, as Finley noted earlier in the season. While the Spurs have teaching practices, the Celtics have an edge with theirs. And coming off the bench, fitting right in, is Rasheed Wallace.

Last summer, the Spurs' staff debated this Piston free agent vs. another. Some saw Antonio McDyess as the solid choice, and others saw Wallace as the intriguing one.

The 'Sheed camp envisioned what happened Tuesday in Orlando. Then, Wallace one-handed a high pass to open the fourth quarter — and threw in a 3-pointer.

Every team can use a floor-stretching, 6-foot-11 talent. Every team wonders about this one. So Doc Rivers called Wallace's former Detroit coach, Larry Brown, for an opinion last summer.

“Get him!” Brown simply said.

Still, the Spurs always have access to Brown, and yet they hesitated. Whereas the Celtics went after Wallace from the start, and might have had him sealed up no matter what the Spurs did, the Spurs drifted toward McDyess.

What happened this season, even as McDyess needed time to find his footing, supported their thinking. Wallace appeared out of shape and out of sorts. He'd show up about every fourth day while putting together the worst shooting percentages of his career.

Even those in the Spurs' organization who had wanted Wallace were shaking their heads. One thought a new environment would have put him on his best behavior. “But there were times during the season,” he said, “when I was thinking, ‘Thank God we didn't get him.'”

As late as April, in a game against Cleveland, Wallace had to be restrained from going after an official. He barked at another ref, and when Rivers tried to intervene, he screamed at him, too, to the shock of his teammates.

That dissipated, partly because the Celtics won that game. LeBron James, in a sign of things to come in the playoffs, chose to pull up on a fastbreak for a 3-pointer in the closing seconds when the Cavaliers trailed by only two.

But Rivers' ability to walk away helped, too, and some in the Spurs organization wonder if the same would have happened in San Antonio. Gregg Popovich has a way with players, but he confronts everyone at some point, and he's never confronted anyone quite like Wallace.

“Ugly,” is how one in the franchise guessed it would have been.

So while the Spurs were once the Celtics, this one personnel move said they weren't. And never could be.